HP IBRIX X9730 Storage System announced

Yesterday, the IBRIX X9730 series of unified storage was announced by HP; including availability now. I’ve been focusing a lot on storage of late, and HP has something good here with IBRIX. I know that HP acquired IBRIX in 2009, and as far as I know I was a little confused about what they are doing with the line.

The announcement yesterday has a few critical points:

The new HP IBRIX X9730 Storage system effortlessly scales to 1.68PB of capacity in a single system and 16PB in a single name space.

The new HP IBRIX X9730 Storage system is ideal for long-term, high-volume active information archiving. HP IBRIX X9730 Storage also delivers three times the sequential workload performance of its predecessor, providing more responsive e-Discovery, data analytics and other capabilities.

The HP IBRIX X9730 Storage system is available immediately, with pricing starting at $192,589 list for 140TB capacity and at $223,589 list for 210TB capacity. Pricing includes all necessary hardware (file serving nodes, storage, networking, rack, etc.) and all software features (including Constant Data Validation, load balancing, local and remote replication and WORM/retention) at no add-on cost.

Unified storage is an interesting topic of recent. I like it for a number of use cases. Namely backup storage and general content. I don’t see this type of storage needing the same granular performance that I’d need to run VMs; but I want something better than cheap and deep JBOD storage. This model leverages 70 3 TB 7.2K LFF dual-port MDL SAS drives; which is good for high capacity storage.

The other interesting point is 1.68 PB. I’ve never come close to that, but it is interesting to see how that can play upward into other environments. A single, scalable and capable NAS resource seems like the logical solution.

This model (as well as the others) have rich features such as data tiering (to help with performance –> but I don’t know what it tiers to – possibly 15,5K drive or SSD..?), snapshots, storage balancing, data evacuation and replication. Protocols supported include CIFS, NFS, HTTP/s and “Web Distributed”.

Interesting to say the least, as it has a rich software stack also (including a backup engine) for high capacity storage. Discuss here or on Twitter @RickVanover if you have any questions.